


We Don't Bleed When We Don't Fight

by capalxii



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Fade to Black, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:10:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two and a half years after the Goolding Inquiry, almost a year since Malcolm dropped off the face of the earth, a conversation between Malcolm and Nicola.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Don't Bleed When We Don't Fight

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title from the National song Runaway.  
> 2\. American writer, any screw-ups in the language are my own fault.  
> 

It was probably a cliche to say it, but the last thing Nicola Murray either needed or wanted to see was Malcolm Tucker, turned up on her doorstep, breath hanging misty in the cold air. Her hand gripped the door knob tighter than normal as she swung the door open, "What the hell are you doing here?" tripping off her tongue before she could stop herself.

The man had the temerity to glare at her. Two and a half years after the inquiry, he still had the gall to look at her like that. "Yes, hello to you as well."

"I'm not interested," she said, moving to shut the door in his face.

"Nicola-"

"No. What are you doing here? Come to gloat?"

The glare came back even stronger than before, and combined with a brief, shaky curl of upper lip. "Gloat about what, exactly? You-" He clenched his jaw and it struck her that he was paler than she remembered. He'd always been white but now he seemed almost translucent. "Fucking let me in. Would you? It's freezing out here."

"It's not that cold, you whinging tosser," she said, but she stepped aside and let him brush past. "I'll make us some tea."

"Yeah."

She went to her kitchen--it was smaller than the last kitchen of hers he'd have seen, over two and a half years ago now, closer to four, but she was more comfortable than she had been in ages. "Why are you here?"

"I can't make a social call?" he asked with an uneven smile. It disappeared as quickly and uncomfortably as it had come, and he shifted from foot to foot until she sighed at him and told him to sit down because the looming was making her nervous. He dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, a strange sort of relief coming off him in waves.

She set the tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits down in front of him, refusing to make eye contact. "You're leaving after you've finished, unless you can give me a good reason why you've showed up."

Malcolm stirred a half spoon of sugar into his tea. "I had a question."

"Then ask it."

His eyes snapped up at her; it had been years since she'd been victim to that gaze of his but time had made it far less effective on her. "I can't fucking finish a biscuit first? Just ask and go?"

"Do you really think I want you here? I've done you a favor not making you freeze your bollocks off on my front door." She ignored the shadow that passed over his face. "Eat, drink, ask, and leave."

Whatever spark that had been in his eyes earlier was now gone. He nodded and picked up a biscuit, biting into it almost mechanically. This Malcolm unnerved her. He seemed smaller; had he always been this bony? Had his clothes always hung off him like this? The low late winter sun cut through the window shades and painted sharp, stark lines against his face, and he squinted whenever he shifted to where the light hit his eyes. "I heard," he said, "you got a university job after all."

"It's not a Yale think tank," she said with a tiny smile. He glanced up at her with something that could have been, in another person, guilt in his eyes, before returning to his biscuit. "But it's good. The students are good. Full of righteousness, dreaming of changing the world."

"I hope you dash those dreams against the sharpest rocks you can find," he said with something approaching humor. 

Nicola turned instantly stony. "I don't." She sipped her tea. "I teach them the perils of hubris. You come up a lot."

She'd meant it to be a twisting knife but she wasn't quite prepared for the consequences. The Malcolm she'd known would have brought out a bigger knife, given a more solid twisting, and added a wrecking ball for good measure. This Malcolm briefly laughed like he was out of breath and nodded. 

It all began to come together for her then: the way he curled over her kitchen table like he didn't want to take up more space than necessary, the way his hands held the slowly-cooling, still-full cup of tea like he desperately needed the warmth of it, the strange mix of anger and confusion and resignation that broke through the mask of his face in those moments he couldn't control it. "It was a posh prison," she said weakly.

"Yeah. It was fine."

"You never did like posh bastards."

"Fucking cum-rag wanking jizz-for-brains twats," he spat. Nicola almost smiled, this was the closest thing to fire she'd seen in him since he'd showed up. "Fucking embezzlers and white-collar Ponzi scheme running fucks. I could've killed them, being stuck in there with them. I could've killed myself. Eighteen months, and every day I-" His mouth shut into a thin line and he clenched his jaw so tight Nicola thought she could almost hear the grinding of his teeth as alarm bells began to go off in her head.

He wouldn't want her concern. She clamped down on it and paid attention to the steam rising off her milky tea. She wasn't supposed to know anyway, except she'd bumbled into his office at Number 10 years ago when Sam had just come back from the chemist with a refill. "Maybe another topic."

"Yes." He glanced out the window, squinting into the sunlight. "I suppose--should I just ask? I'll just--the inquiry. I had a question about the inquiry."

She hadn't thought about the inquiry since it happened. Or she'd tried not to, at any rate--nobody involved had been a friend to her, even the ones she'd thought prior to the inquiry had been friends to her. Of all of them, Malcolm had been the only one whose actions she could halfway understand. And even then--"I'm not sure you'll get an answer."

He looked like he honestly had not thought of that possibility. Like he'd thought he could just walk in to her home and her life after so long, drag up unwanted memories, and scrape a response off them with a blunt blade, no problem. "Listen to the question first."

"Why? I should just throw you out on your ear." She thought there'd be at least some fight in him at that. He licked his lips and nodded, standing to leave. "Christ--Malcolm, I'm not kicking you out. Ask the bloody question."

He kept standing there--he seemed shorter than his six foot frame, and at once less substantial and more weighed down than he'd been before the inquiry. A year and a half of prison wouldn't do that to him; he'd always been too much of a spitfire for something as mundane as prison to harm him. A year and a half stuck in the same place as the type of people he'd railed against for so long, the type of people he'd thought were the cancer killing the nation and coming to terms with the fact that he'd literally been placed in the same box as them, just might have. "Why didn't you implicate me?"

"What?"

"You had a chance," he continued, his voice tinged with urgency. "They asked you if you wanted to name--the last time you were called up, you could have pointed the finger directly at me, but you didn't. Everyone else did. The inquiry all but ordered you to name me. You could've hammered the final nail in. Why didn't you?"

Because she couldn't, even after everything. He'd given her the leadership, he'd given her some kind of hope that she could be more than what she was. He'd made her feel wanted, and as far as she could tell, he hadn't been faking that, at least not always. Not the way he'd faked everything else. Even after what he'd done to her, she couldn't answer his deep betrayal with one of her own. "You were hardly the only one engaged in that business," she said instead. "You're just the only one with the testicular fortitude to have admitted it. I wasn't keen on singling you out."

His shoulders dropped, though she wasn't sure if it was from relief or disappointment. "That's it, then. That's all I wanted to ask."

"Did you leak the medical records?" He startled at her question, staring at her with a look that was a combination of disgust and anxiety. "You asked me a question, I'll ask you one. Tit for tat."

His lips parted and he frowned. For a long moment she thought he was going to say something, but he shifted his eyes, squinting at nothing while trying to avoid her gaze, her question, the universe itself it seemed. Finally, he shrugged, licked his lower lip, and shook his head. "Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters, Malcolm. Did you do it?"

"I don't recall."

She scowled and rolled her eyes. "You're not under oath, you fucking-"

"I honestly don't." He shrugged violently, his eyes a colder blue than normal. "I don't remember, all right? There was so much shit being slung about, I-" A hand went to his hip and the other clenched into a fist, pressed against his mouth as he turned away. His fingers unclenched slowly but his hand barely moved away from his face. "I don't recall. I don't even remember how I got the fucking numbers in the first place."

There'd only been a cursory police investigation into the leak itself, and Nicola had, at the time, figured that had been one last Malcolm Tucker Special; that somehow he'd managed to get the cops to ignore that charge by pleading guilty to perjury and working some other magic. She'd thought he'd weaseled out of it legitimately, in the slimy way he'd weaseled out of everything else, and she wasn't prepared for the realization that he was never quite as omniscient as she'd thought him to be. That the charge had been dropped due to a real lack of evidence and leads, and that he'd done something as boring as gotten lucky.

"For whatever it's worth, I don't think I did," he said quietly. His hands dropped back to his side, then crossed his chest, then pushed into his trouser pockets. "I like to think I wouldn't have."

"I like to think that, as well," Nicola said. "Sit back down. Your tea's probably gone cold." 

He slipped back into his chair and wrapped his fingers around the cup again. "It's fine."

"Then drink it, you daft old bastard." A look flashed across his eyes, too fast for her to read, but she could guess at its meaning given her earlier words. "I'm not throwing you out. Just drink. Have you seen anyone else? From, you know. From then."

He shook his head. "Nobody worthwhile. I haven't even wanted to."

Her eyebrows went up at that. "Not even Sam? Sure she'd love to see you."

A brief, tiny smile ghosted his lips. "I'm a pariah, Nicola. You are too, but she's--I'd damage her career if I went to see her."

"Do you really think she'd care? She always loved you. Don't know why, but she did."

He smiled like he was about to laugh but no sound came out. "Sam's a clever girl. She knows I'm poison as much as I know it. And she knows it would kill me to poison her. She's staying away from me as much as I'm staying away from her." His smile faded and he finally took a sip of his tea. "So clever. I'm so proud of her, do you know she's working for some immigrant advocacy group now? Proper grassroots work. Properly helping people. Not that pile of absurd worthless shite that I was doing."

The smile that had grown on Nicola's face hearing him talk about Sam dropped. "It wasn't worthless. We helped people."

He looked at her with disgust. "You wanted to starve children and let sailors drown."

"I did not-" She glared at him warningly. "Everything we did, we did to get into a position to help others."

"That was the problem, wasn't it? So busy jockeying for position, we never looked at the consequences." He'd said it without any real emotion, his voice sounding like wind through dry leaves. "Proud of Sam, though. She got out intact. Actually doing something now."

"I could pass on a message, if you like," she said.

He looked at her askance, a sly and derisive smirk playing across his features. "What makes you think I haven't already?"

She kicked herself mentally. This new Malcolm may have been a shell of his former self, but it's not as though he wouldn't have been able to do something as simple as get some sympathetic person to pass on a message. Still, she was curious who would do it for him, and she asked.

"Ollie." His grin turned a bit feral, looking more like himself than he had looked all afternoon. "On the promise that I'd never visit him again."

She bit back a laugh at the image of the deceptively boyish-looking little gobshite squirming in fear, and not knowing himself whether he was afraid of Malcolm's presence undermining his political capital or whether he was just afraid of Malcolm himself. "Still. If you ever need to pass on another, and Ollie won't-"

"No, it's fine," he said. He leaned back and cut his gaze at her. "You'd probably fuck it up anyway."

"That's lovely," she said. "Come round for tea uninvited, ask uncomfortable questions, then insult me. So good to have you back, Malcolm."

He grimaced slightly at himself. "That was uncalled for," he admitted. "Anyway, you only ever fucked up because of me."

"Don't think so highly of yourself. I fucked up because I was a fuck-up."

He half-frowned, half-smiled. "Did you just try to insult me by insulting yourself?"

"Told you I was a fuck-up."

The laughter cut some of the nervous tension that had been hanging in the air. Then he sighed and the laugh that had draped across his face slipped away as he stared into the nothingness of her neighborhood outside the window. "Nicola, I think I'm a bigger fuck-up than you'd ever been. You don't even know your fucking left from right, and I think I'm a bigger fuck-up."

"Well, I never went to prison, so probably," she muttered, before she could stop herself. She cringed as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but he didn't get angry or hurt. She decided to move on. "What are your plans? What have you done since you got out? It's been nearly a year, yes?"

"I visited my sister," he said. "It was nice to see them, but I felt-" He was full-on frowning now, his brow stuck in a knitted-together look, his eyes squinting and distant, his lips parted just so. "I felt like a ghost. Suppose I still do, a bit."

Nicola almost said it was because he was a ghost, showing up out of nowhere like this. Not just that, but showing up missing some basic components of himself, like someone had carved out some integral Malcolm Tucker-ness and forgotten to replace it with anything. The legend, the infamous tyrant, was a ragdoll of a middle-aged man with no skills other than manipulation and no networks to manipulate. Lost at sea without a life jacket, no longer capable of being the man he'd defined himself as for so long. "Will you write a book?" 

"It's the thing to do, isn't it?" he asked rhetorically. "Book, bullshit think tank position, TV appearances. Launder the reputation, rebuild the contact list." He paused and added, "I was thinking of starting a food blog," and Nicola couldn't tell if he was being serious or not.

Should she reach across the table to touch his hands? She did, whether she should have or not. They were cold. No wonder he'd kept hold of that cup for so long. "You could do a bit better than that, Malcolm. The sentence was to make an example of someone. Everyone knows the charges were-"

"The sentence was what it was, the charges were what they were and I'm not going back regardless," he said. He didn't move his hands from under hers. "Even if I wanted to. Do you know, when they released me, the only one there to witness it was a spotty blogger with an iPhone? Not even if I wanted to."

It was never Malcolm to give up like that. "And are you sure you don't want to?" she pushed. "Maybe you're just feeling low, you just need to-" She hesitated, not knowing whether to bring it up. She knew that he knew that she knew, but they'd never mentioned it out loud before. "Are you talking to anyone? Are you still taking...?"

He swallowed and licked his lips. "Are we really-" His voice was quiet as grit along pavement as he stopped his own words from falling.

"Just answer it, please."

"Hasn't worked the same in months, but yes," he muttered, refusing to meet her eyes. After a moment, his eyes slowly searched out hers. "This is me on an increased dosage, darling, and seeing my shrink regularly for once. Believe it or not, I'm doing well right now."

"...Christ, Malcolm."

"Nicola, this is a successful day and I'm proud of it and none of this brain chemistry cock-up of mine has that much to do with my decision at any rate, other than not wanting to pile completely unnecessary shit on top of it anymore, and not wanting to skip out on therapy because the world is going to shit due to some backbench bollocks-wagon fuck giving up launch codes over Twitter, so fuck off with your mawkish cunting pity. I'm just telling you. I've had a lot of time to think about it and I'm not going back." He chuckled, his lips curling into a sneer for a quick moment before turning into a wry smile. "I like my successful days, and I'd rather not spend them doing something where I'm surrounded by idiot children."

She couldn't imagine that mind of his sitting in a garden somewhere, tending to tomatoes or basil or whatever it was that people did in normal retirements. She couldn't even really imagine him writing a book or doing talk shows, he'd always been happier in the shadows than on the front page. She really had no idea what to tell him. "Well, if you're looking for work, I am in need of a handsome and strapping pool boy."

He stared at her as if she'd gone mad for a second, before bursting into laughter. His hands finally left hers, but only to scrub at his eyes as he leaned back in his chair. "I don't think 'handsome and strapping' ever applied to me, even when 'boy' did. But I'll keep the offer in mind if desperation hits. Although--do you even have a pool?"

"If I had a handsome and strapping pool boy, I would get a pool to go with him," she said. "Got to keep the lad occupied somehow."

"Come on, I'm sure you'd find something else for him to do," he said with a sly grin.

"No, no," she denied with her own smile. "I'd just want to look at him. You know my tastes always were a little..." Her gaze swept up and down his face and torso before settling on the tabletop. 

Which meant that she almost missed the flurry of emotions that passed across his face--bashfulness, nostalgia, a few others that she could see but didn't understand--before that cool mask clamped back down into place. "Oh, no," he said. "We're not going for any sort of pity fuck today, Nicola, you soppy, saccharine shitting tit."

"It was always pity fucks with you, Malcolm, that's the only kind you could ever get without paying," she said, her eyes flashing coldly. She immediately regretted it. "No it wasn't. That was cruel of me to say, and a lie."

"Not that much of a lie," he said with a shrug. "And not that cruel. You never were cruel enough, and that was your problem."

"No it wasn't."

"No." He stood again, as if to leave. "It wasn't. I was sorry to hear of your divorce, by the way."

"Don't be, we should have done it long before," she said, standing with him. "I think the divorce might have been more amicable than the marriage ever was. Sure you don't want another cup before you go?"

"Nah. Let me help you pick up," he said. Before she could object, he picked up her empty cup and his three-quarters-full one and took them to the sink. She joined him with the crumb-laden biscuit plate and nudged him out of the way so that she could do the washing up; she didn't really want him to do any work, but didn't stop him when he started drying the dishes once she was done with them. 

"Look at the two of us," she said, tutting slightly. "This is the most domestic I think I've been in decades."

"It's weird." He flipped the damp dishtowel onto her shoulder. "I think I like it."

She regarded him thoughtfully. He was definitely skinnier than the last time she'd seen him, and in the afternoon sun she thought she could see right through him. "Did you ever wonder? What would have happened if I'd gone, if you hadn't told me to stay?"

For a moment, if she squinted, he looked nearly wistful. Sad, even. Then the moment was gone, he smirked and glanced away. "Wouldn't have gone to prison for a year and a half, that's for sure."

"You would've been on some awful shouty panel talk show, nearly as bad," she quipped. 

"True."

"But you do regret it."

He grimaced, pursed his lips. Leaned against the sink, one hand braced on the counter and the other brushing against her forearm, her wrist, until his fingers found hers and slipped between them. "I don't-" His gaze flickered down to her mouth before flickering back up to her eyes. "I don't regret all of it."

His voice had been low and vulnerable, as fragile as the rest of him seemed. She dropped the dishtowel onto the counter and quietly, she tightened her grip on his hand and pulled him behind her, up the creaky stairs, around the corner to her bedroom. Pushed him to sit on the bed and lifted off his jumper, undid the shirt under it, peeled off the vest beneath that. He finally pulled her down to him, muttering, "Bit cold now, need to warm up," and she smiled into his kiss as she curled around him. 

After, as the sun was dipping below the horizon, she reached over him and clicked on the bedside lamp. He shifted slightly, resting his head on her shoulder, in the crook of her neck, pressing kisses against her collarbone and throat. Her fingers traced patterns against his back, down his sides--he was still ticklish in that one spot she recalled, just below his ribs, and he squirmed against her when her fingernails raked lightly over the skin there. He reached down and tugged the covers over them, lacing his legs together with hers. "Comfortable?" she asked.

"Mm," was all he said. His bare skin against hers felt soft, his body nearly electric and his breath warm and steadying. "We were always good at this, weren't we? Could bollocks up anything else, but not this."

"Yeah. This was never the problem," she agreed.

He looked up at her then, his eyes piercing her from under his brow. "Why didn't you implicate me? Really?"

Nicola remembered the first time he'd looked at her like that, from that same spot, head on her chest and sweat forming a sheen across his skin. It felt like ages ago, like another lifetime, and she supposed in a way that it was. The heady days after he'd murmured to her, "Stay," after he'd committed to pouring every last ounce of his considerable power into making her leader, came rushing back to her; stressful days and late nights that ended with them taking each other apart, stripping each other down to their most basic parts to wash the rest of the universe from their skins. Him pushing her to believe she could, to believe that he believed even when she didn't believe it herself. Shouting matches that ended with his apologies whispered into her hair, down her stomach and between her thighs. The way she'd caught him staring once, in the reflection of a glass cabinet, with a distinct look of what-if on his face, a look that seemed to curse her ex-husband, and known that it had nothing to do with contracts or emails or anything else. The way he'd caught her looking at him the same way, not long after. He'd walked through hell with her and she couldn't have implicated him any more than she could have carved her own heart out of her chest, even after he'd shoved her back into the fire later on. 

His hand was resting on her stomach, and she brushed her thumb against the jutting bone of his wrist before bringing his hand up to kiss his palm. "You know why."

He slipped his hand onto her pillow and raised himself up to look down at her. "Nicola, tell me."

The words got caught in her throat. "You know, Malcolm."

"But I need to hear it."

"Let me hear it from you first." She knew the next thing would cut, but she steeled herself to say it anyway. "You're the one who betrayed me, not the other way round, and I at least deserve to hear it from you first."

A muscle jumped in his jaw, his eyes searched her face for something, and his breath escaped his lips like he'd meant to speak but couldn't. Closing his eyes, he leaned down and kissed her forehead, whispered, "Maybe you were cruel enough," before sliding out of her bed to pull on his clothes. The old stairs creaked rhythmically under him, and the front door closed with a click behind him. 

The next week, in the afternoon, a light snow was falling, fat flakes drifting through bare branches and settling on the shoulders of Malcolm's dark jacket and tips of his silver hair as he stood on her doorstep. He said nothing, his breath coming out in puffs of mist as he swallowed nervously and waited for either her welcome or her dismissal.

She brushed some of that snow from his shoulders, guided him inside, and put the kettle on.

**Author's Note:**

> How the leak happened in this story, and why Malcolm doesn't recall the details: in my headcanon, he'd gotten the numbers for his own purposes but never meant for them to be in the photograph with the "quiet batpeople" quote. It had been purely accidental that the numbers were not hidden by other papers or in a folder. That's the only explanation I have for why he'd bring up the "quiet batpeople" photo in the inquiry--he honestly didn't know there was anything incriminating in the un-cropped photo.
> 
> However, given the amount of leaking, lying, and general two-facedness happening, after running through every possible scenario in his brain Malcolm could no longer remember which scenario was the reality and which was the lie he would have told others. There were too many lies to keep track of.


End file.
